In many companies and areas with professionals—as an example nurses in many hospitals—continuing education reimbursement is built into nurses' contracts of employment. However, the mechanism of accessing this money makes the use of it more difficult, and as a result, only a small percentage of the several billion dollars allotted just for nurses is actually used. Furthermore, adding to these figures unused reimbursement amounts allocated for teachers and other professionals brings this number to tens of billions of dollars of unused monies.
As an example, in a hospital situation, a nurse might get pre-approval for a continuing education class that relates to his or her work. The money is often in the nurse's contract and the nurse therefore has a right to reimbursement. However, the money for reimbursement cannot get to the nurse, even with pre-approval, until she presents a receipt for the class, and then reimbursement might take a considerable period of time. The New York State Nurses Association currently has a continuing education reimbursement level of $2,000.00 per nurse per year in the Association's contract. However, many nurses do not have the money to lay out while awaiting payment from their employer.
Computerized methods and systems for providing credit card services are well known in the art. FIG. 1 illustrates how credit cards are commonly employed in transactions. Typically at least four parties are involved in a transaction involving a credit card purchase: the cardholder, the merchant, the merchant's bank, and the card issuing bank. The cardholder makes the purchase (obtaining the goods in process 105), signing a credit card charge (in process 101), which the merchant forwards to the merchant's bank, usually in a batch process (106). The merchant's bank in turn (in process 110) pays the merchant on the charge (the merchant receiving the funds in process 111) and (in process 107) forwards the charge to the card issuing bank (which receives the batch in process 108). The card issuing bank (in process 109) pays the merchant bank and debits the cardholder's credit account. The cardholder (in process 112) is billed periodically, commonly monthly, by the card issuing bank, and (in process 114) pays the card issuing bank (which receives the funds credits the account in process 115). Typically the amount received by the merchant from the merchant's bank reflects a discount for handling by the merchant's bank of its portion of the transaction, and the amount received by the merchant's bank from the card issuing bank reflects another discount for the card issuing bank's participation in the transaction.
When the charge is viewed by the merchant as substantial, the merchant may seek (in process 102) and obtain (in process 104) approval from the card issuing bank (granted in process 103) to enter into the charge transaction with the customer, and such approval provides enhanced protection against the risk that the card issuing bank will refuse to honor the cardholder's charge.
The processes described in connection with FIG. 1 are explicated and exemplified in various aspects in references including (i) a description on the web site of Bank of America at http://www.bankofamerica.com/small_business/merchant_card_processing/index.cfm?template=card_processing_basics as viewed on Feb. 6, 2009 at 7:07 p.m. EST; (ii) the Wikipedia article on “Credit card” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card as viewed on Feb. 6, 2009 at 7:13 p.m. EST; U.S. Pat. No. 6,606,205 entitled “Credit Card Billing Method and System”; (iv) Chakravorti et al., “A Study of the Interrelated Bilateral Transactions in Credit Card Networks,” Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, 2001, available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=294510 on Feb. 7, 2009; (iv) Hunt, “An Introduction to the Economics of Payment Card Networks,” Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, 2003, available at www.philadelphiafed.org/research-and-data/publications/working-papers/2003/wp03-10.pdf on Feb. 7, 2009; “Credit Card Processing—Glossary of Terms,” available at http://www.fasttransactonline.com/credit_card_glossary.htm on Feb. 7, 2009 at 12:53 p.m. EST; U.S. Pat. No. 3,852,571 entitled “System of Transferal of Funds”; U.S. Pat. No. 4,172,552, entitled “Credit Card Processing System”; and U.S. Pat. No. 5,056,019 entitled “Automated Purchase Reward Accounting System and Method.” Each of these references is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.